Chengdu has a number of new private museums, mostly in the outer suburbs, many of them associated with real estate developments. One of these is Chengdu MoCA in the city’s southern suburbs. When I visited a year ago there were a couple of nice exhibitions of sculpture and video art. You can take the subway, but I took the bus—you can see more. In particular, you go past Chengdu’s New Century Global Center (新世纪环球中心), the world’s largest building in floor space (18,000,000 square feet). When I went to editing the video it got a little pixelly and squirrelly, but it matched my memory of the trip pretty well—its got a surreal quality.
In his own words, photographer Yang Hui (杨麾) “was born in the middle reaches of the Jialing River in Nanchong. At eight I began to come and go between the countryside and city, at the school in an old ancestral hall where my mother taught or in an old temple. During the years of the Great Leap Forward [1958-9] I almost always went with my mother to the edge of the field to ‘checkup’ on the villagers to see if they’d dug [furrows] deeply enough.” The Jialing is one of Sichuan’s major rivers and helps make Sichuan one of the most fertile and densely populated places in China. “I became a photographer and really liked the people, I shot black and white film with a 35 mm camera in this really interesting place. The experiences I went through were unforgettably engraved on my heart. Over these some dozen years, I used photography’s recording function to bring a comprehension of life, to bring the way northern Sichuan’s people give to another when both are short, their unaffected friendships, equality, sincerity, unity of body and mind. I used the lens to throw all the passion I feel towards my fellow north Sichuan villagers.” When he took them, Yang Hui’s photographs probably didn’t seem especially unique, just everyday life in rural China. But his familiarity with those little corners and transfer points of rural life, his willingness to get muddy and wet with the other villagers, the comfort his subjects had with a man and his camera, his selection of places and time, and more than anything his belonging in this community, to this muddy place, village squares, docks, wharves and city markets underline the way he’s “writing what you know” in these photographs and make them that great art that shows the history of a unique time.
Yang Hui’s photographs document a period of change for villagers in rural Sichuan. Transportation was for the most part primitive, and as surprising as it might be looking at muddy roads, docks and simple markets, it had already improved a great deal over the poverty-struck conditions of the seventies and stood on the brink of the great changes of the late nineties and twenty-first century. Transportation and markets themselves were new: one river boat became 20, motorcycles appeared and then abounded, roads were improved, the chaos and opportunity of development was everywhere, motorcycles, trucks and the contract system had already transformed the countryside; reforms that allowed trade and markets had already reached deeply into country life.
Those are the broad strokes, the stuff you read in the papers. But Yang catches the ways that people lived in that, the man selling a couple of fish in a tank made out of plastic bags, an old fellow setting his watch by the wall clock hung in a box on a pole on the wharf or another who enjoys a close shave while mothers wait for the barber to shave their boys heads. Girls selling fruit, selling balloons, selling panties: not international trade, just the beginnings of a simple market economy. The dates of the photos mark the increasing pace of development, from the picture of a few women selling oranges in front of a dilapidated bank in the mid eighties to the ferry boat owners crying aboard customers in the nineties. In one photo, three women collect fares for a ferry that their families manage under the “contract system” established to give local people an economic interest in the economic expansion. The contract for management of the ferry was probably too expensive for one family, so three have cooperated and sent the young wives of each family’s sons (who are more than likely working construction for wages) to collect fares. Chinese people see this in a glance in Yang’s photo: he tells the whole story in that terse, simple composition. In the most recent pictures you can see rural government at work: a leader hurrying to the dais at a big “on the spot” meeting, or by contrast people gathered in front of a remote village’s unrenovated offices to greet visiting officials and, one of my favorites, the three-martini lunch, Sichuan-style with cadres downing shots of sorghum liquor after a meal, an important and time-tried way to establish friendships and contacts among officials from different levels, offices and regions.
The muddy roads in the photos are four lanes now, mechanized equipment has replaced the hand labor of the eighties and nineties, people no longer travel from village to town to cut hair or sell things on a blanket. The humanity and love Yang Hui brings to his portraits of Nanchong villagers stands foremost, and the openness in their faces reflects the understanding and sympathy with which he approaches them. The exhibition captures a time and a place in the not very distant past that has already vanished almost completely, and people’s sometimes inexplicable nostalgia for that time come clear in just those qualities that Yang Hui captured in his photographs.
These photos are from an exhibition of Yang Hui’s prints that was mounted at the Sichuan Gallery of Fine Arts in Chengdu in November of 2017. These are intended for educational use only. Please respect the artist’s rights to his work.
The captions are my translations of Yang Hui’s captions, in some cases edited to catch the sense of his colloquial Chinese.
Hugh Masekela passed last week, and it seemed there was far too little said about one of our time’s great musical masters, his brave stance in politics, self-exile from South Africa and energetic international advocacy for political change and against apartheid.
Masekela was a talented trumpeter, singer, composer and band leader. He made great music throughout his long career, knew and worked with some of the greatest artists of the African diaspora (and others: check out his interplay with Roger McGuinn on the Byrds So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star). His compositions reflected the lives of labor sojourners and migrants who struggled for dignity and a living in brutal systems of exploitation and degradation; his trumpet playing was spirited, lyrical and transcendent. You can read more in his Wiki or on his official site.
I first heard his music on a juke box at a University of Pennsylvania hang everyone called the Dirty Drug. They had his huge 1968 hit Grazing in the Grass, but I liked the funky flip better, Bajabula Bonke. I saw him in 1990 along with 50,000 other enthusiastic Atlantans when he played for Nelson Mandela’s U. S. Tour after his release from a South African prison and again at Wesleyan University when he played there in 2013. That performance was a revelation, up close and beautiful with a great band and his enormous presence. He told a little joke about being in Zimbabwe with his “old friend” Robert Mugabe, then added, “He stole my cookies.”
There is a lifetime of his good music on record, and your local library will likely have a disc or two: check it out. A great man, a great musician, a great humanitarian and an important voice for freedom, progressive political change and against the poison of racism.
You can see some video of the Wesleyan performance by clicking the image above. All of the songs listed next to it are downloadable with a right click.
This is when people make up “best of” lists. I am disinclined. I am about three years behind with music and comfortable with a delay that helps to sort out the truly terrible stuff from the bands that are a little bit steadier, deeper, more interesting. Call me old fashioned.
But this year has presented me with a chance to see a lot of films, and curated at that by a knowledgeable practitioner. So here’s a list of four I liked (I am not going to stretch it out to ten just for form’s sake).
It’s hard to describe The Florida Project because there really aren’t any films like it. The story is told from the perspective of a couple of seven year olds who live in an Orlando motel that has been converted into a housing project. Their lives are really really fun: little adult supervision, plenty of playmates and a playground-like environment of bright colors, weirdly decorated fast food restos, tourist hotels and abandoned housing developments. The actors playing the kids (Brooklyn Prince and Christopher Rivera) are riveting as is their mother (Bria Vinaite): Willem Dafoe as the manager lends a contrast, but even he plays along with the kids pranks and games. But as the film goes on, we can’t help but have a different understanding of what’s going on, and those other parts become more consequential even as we retain the kids’ perspective. The film works at so many levels, seductive, fun, colorful, playful, bratty, deep, disturbing and emotionally powerful: it’s one you’ll still be thinking about weeks after you see it.
Mudbound is set in the Jim Crow south of the forties. The “invisible lines” we think we’re familiar with are drawn in a little more darkly, a little more specifically, more dramatically. Director Dee Rees drew on family stories for details and they are telling. It’s about farm life: I kept thinking of the Drive By Trucker’s lyric, “There ain’t much to country living, sweat, piss, jizz, blood.” Add mud, which abounds. It opens on two white men digging a grave in a downpour who are stopped when they hit shackles and a skull.
It’s a film about parallels and contrasts: middle class white newlyweds move onto a farm where a family of black share croppers already lives. Characters share a life, a space, but not a society and crises have differential effects. Support cannot be offered or accepted, neighbors are not neighbors. Then WWII takes two sons of that mud—one black one white; parallel, contrasting—and when they return, damaged and liberated by their experience of the European war—parallel, contrasting—they are forced to play old roles that no longer fit. The bond they form is dangerous for both of them. You can see it on Netflix, but try to see it in a theater, the film is cinematic.
13th is from last year but I saw it this year and it really moved me. Ava DuVernay’s polished film analyzes the history of African-American incarceration since the Civil War as an extension of slavery based on the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for convicts. The superlative use of images and news clips and the interviews with academics and public intellectuals (Angela Davis!) are pointed and clear. A fine film on an issue that needs to stay current as the national political discourse fragments. Like Mudbound (and 2017’s outstanding O.J.-An American Story), you can see the fruits of #oscarssowhite in the high production values based on suddenly better funding for work like this.
Baby Driver is a fun movie and it is built around music which sounds a good note for me. It is set in Atlanta, which is another plus, it is unusually smart for a chase movie and it has great performances from John Hamm, Jamie Foxx and Eiza Gomez (who can really deliver a line) and an only OK one from, well, he whose name should not be mentioned. It is a way above average, fun summer movie. I have not heard anyone who saw it diss it (except a few critics who are….well, often notoriously off base on films like this).
You have to see this as the twin to Mike Love’s autobio, Good Vibrations: I wrote earlier that you were constantly reading between the lines in that book. Brian’s book is exactly the opposite: if anything there is just too much information, Brian is way in touch with his feelings and ready to share. He writes repeatedly about his lifelong struggle with mental illness and is frank about his drug use. I’d had the idea that he was an acid casualty, but he only tripped twice and wrote a lot of California Girls during one of those. He began smoking pot beginning in 1964 (a year he repeatedly refers to as “the year everything happened,” the year the Beach Boys became international stars, had their first number one record, (the year the Beatles broke in America), and the year he had a mental breakdown on a flight from Houston and retired from performing). In the seventies he was fed semi-pro cocktails of psychoactive drugs by his therapist, Eugene Landy while he continued to self-medicate when he could with whatever he could get his hands on, from a four pack a day smoking habit and lots of bevvies to downs, coke and even heroin.
Brian Wilson is not one to push himself forward. “I wasn’t usually the kind of guy who would make a big deal about correcting a misunderstanding. If someone got the wrong idea about me, I might agree with a wrong story just to get out of the conversation.” Shy and sensitive (“The guy in the song sounds like he hasn’t even talked to the surfer girl. He just watches her and thinks about her. That was me. I was kind of shy, and whenever I started talking to a girl she would end up talking to Dennis or Mike instead. They were slicker and more aggressive, and I sort of got moved off to the side to wonder if the girl ever liked me or was interested at all”), but immensely creative (same quote continued: “I felt a little lonely at times, but I also knew that it made for good songs. Loneliness was something that everyone felt but that people were afraid to talk about”), people tried to control him through most of his life: his father, his band, his therapist, his band again, “One of the things I did back then was think about Don’t Hurt My Little Sister all the time. Maybe it’s because it was a song about protection and I felt scared that no one was protecting me.” But the main theme here is his second marriage to Melinda Wilson, better (professional) doctors, a more effective drug regimen and a healthy environment that put him back on his feet. He is relentlessly positive, happy to be writing and performing and seems surprised that people hold him and his work in such high regard. This is nice to see in a superstar.
There are heroes and there are villains: Brian’s abusive and controlling therapist of the seventies and early eighties Eugene Landy comes off really really badly, (only a step above cameo band contact Charles Manson), finally loses his license to practice and fades into a notable obscurity. Dad Murry Wilson terrorizes his sons but also, in Brian’s telling, loves them (unlike Landy), gives them music and, a child of the depression, constantly urges them (often violently) to work harder: ”You have to sing harder,” he said, ”like you care.” ”I’m a genius, too, Brian,” and then not too much later, ““I cannot believe that such a beautiful young boy, who was kind, loving, received good grades in school and had so many versatile talents, could become so obsessed to prove that he was better than his father.” Mike Love….Mike Love. Brian writes, “This Mike, Mike Love, was very friendly and very funny and he made me laugh. I really liked him. We hit it off real well, and soon enough he was almost a fourth brother,” and then “Other guys in the group didn’t like the idea. Mike couldn’t believe it. When he heard the demos he just shook his head and stared at me. The record label wasn’t sure about the album either. Often the record labels agreed with the other guys in the group. The album never came out….” Complicated. The long string of abusive relationships crippled his creative work and raises questions that many many many people on the internet have felt they could answer. I can’t. I’m glad he’s happy, that he’s recording and performing and that people can again enjoy his music.
I finished reading Mike Love’s autobiography, “Good Vibrations.” This is a book where you’re constantly reading between the lines and I did it the wrong way around, most people read Brian’s first. Mike Love is a force, raised in privilege in Baldwin Hills, cars, talent, Swedish good looks, an easy familiarity with the way things are, he perfectly represented the Southern California myth that the Beach Boys epitomized: Lutheran, a rebel whose rebellion mainly consists of lots of girlfriends (Lots! And Lots! More below), a casual attitude towards ethnic divisions, drinking (beer!) and generally transcending the extremely narrow moral ground of his parents while he remained conventionally double standard. Later he turns to environmentalism, the soft, acceptable politics of ocean, earth, love and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, all the while finding comfort close to the Reagans and George H. W. Bush (while opposing the Iraq invasion, based on Maharishi Mahesh’s own opposition).
While the world surges and quakes around him, his own somewhat situational and personally satisfying values seem not to change. His main concern is not, as many charge, money but rather security: he builds the Beach Boys brand and it provides a lifetime of support for all of the band members and their families despite what is often only a mediocre product. This has obviously good but equally obvious bad effects, most immediately on the band members, most clearly on Brian Wilson, the genius, and then by extension on their families. Disastrous actions do not have disastrous effects. Mike goes through women like….what’s the metaphor? He has a lot of them. There are two marriages in five short chapters, he has the marriage certificate for the current one filed with the divorce papers from the previous one in the same folder. I lost count—five? Six? Traditional, he will not live with a woman who he has not married, but living with them invariably (until he’s 55 or so) ends in a breakup. Just like….oh yeah, the band.
Here at least it is obvious that he is the one who keeps the band together, popular and touring, and that is no small feat. He will not be swayed, he is continually positive about their worth and value even as their reputation slides on mediocre albums followed by terrible albums punctuated by occasional unexpected hits. He mentions poor management which they definitely experienced. He compares Brian Epstein’s Beatles management to dad and sociopath Murry Wilson’s Beach Boy’s management (compare stage costumes) as a telling if late revelation. Paul McCartney suggests they pay more attention to their album covers: and other things, Mike, and other things. Until it was a little too late to draw the best, all of the music and business relationships are based on family ties or people they meet personally, the old southern way. The Beatles found actual real professionals when they were at the top. No management in Los Angeles saw the Beach Boys as anything but one hit wonders, and when Brian started hitting harder, first with I Get Around and Barbara Ann, and then Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys became the first of the new kind of bands that no one knew what to do with, most especially the rest of the band.
All of it goes back to a mythical time for Americans, imagined largely in terms of Southern California high school with its ideal combination of cars, girls, beer and a carefree (careless?) life full of imagination (Brian) and daring (Mike). They never really grow out of it, try as they might. Mike is smart and perceptive, writes the lyrics to some of their best songs (Good Vibrations, California Girls, Warmth of the Sun, Don’t Worry Baby, etc.), but when Brian’s wife Melinda tells him, “You’ve got a big chip on your shoulder, Mike Love,” he responds with “Oh yeah? Well me and my chip are out of here” and momentarily quits the band. It’s telling, and he tells it. Left out are how and why his cruises with Brian, listening to the radio together and harmonizing (Imagine! Mike Love and Brian Wilson on the Hollywood Freeway, Saturday night, windows down, singing along loud! with the Jive Five, My True Story or the Regents Barbara-Ann), why those cruises came to an end, and why neither one of them could ever really find the way out of that.
The last chapter of the book has this section, deeper, more personal and revealing than anything else in the book:
“In 1972, Brian wrote “Mount Vernon and Fairway,” the corner of my childhood home. It wasn’t really a song but a 12 minute fairytale, or allegory, about a young Prince (me) whose special bedroom window (like mine) ”looked down into a deep, deep forest [and glimpsed] distant lights from other castles in the kingdom.” A Pied Piper (Brian) brings magical music to the Prince through a glowing transistor radio (like the one we listened to as kids). The Piper tells the Prince that if he leaves the transistor radio on after midnight, the Piper will bring more magic music to him. In days ahead, the Prince does that, but “he heard nothing like the music of that magic night… There’s nothing but Bach on this radio.” The Prince stops believing in the Piper and disregards the transistor until he hears a mysterious sound one night.
Could it be the Pied Piper himself, Coming out of the magic transistor radio? Or was it just the wind whistling by the castle window.
If you have a transistor radio and the lights are all out some night, Don’t be very surprised if [the radio] turns to light green. And the whirling magic sound of the Pied Piper comes to visit you. I’m the Pied Piper In the radio.
Like I said, in this book you’re constantly reading between the lines.
I just finished reading Elvis Costello’s autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. I have always liked Elvis Costello’s music and know that’s not a universal opinion. “That pigeon toed thing,” “The avenging dork,” (Village Voice), “Don’t take off the glasses!” (manager Jake Riviera), those many long albums, that Ray Charles thing (he apologizes profusely and at length). On the other side a masterful, varied, much admired and prolific song writer, head of a great band, a great voice and admirable (and again varied) musical knowledge. He starts his career wildly aggressive and very slowly moves to more lyrical music with more complex (but still rocking) arrangements and then to a reflective style with many stellar collaborations (Burt Bacharach, George Jones, Chet Baker, Brodsky Quartet, Questlove, Macca, T-Bone Burnett, others). At heart, I think, he has always been a romantic: many of his best songs are ballads and his politics are fundamentally Fenian (“God saving the queen hadn’t always seemed like good idea in our house”), progressive (Rock Against Racism during the punk thing), and on display (Oliver’s Army, Green Shirt, Shipbuilding, White Knuckles, What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding (which he didn’t write but everyone thinks he did)….but ultimately also deeply romantic.
You’re curious going into it about the writing—after all, he’s one of the most prolific popular musicians with eight great almost all original albums (My Aim is True,This Years Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, Punch the Clock, Trust, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate). In the book, the writing’s good but doesn’t call attention to itself. There are many quotes of lyrics and like most quotes of lyrics they make you realize how important the musical part is, accenting the good lines, covering the weak ones. Song writing is his main craft (he was originally signed to Stiff records as a songwriter rather than performer) and that affects the book’s writing style which is elliptical in sometimes confusing ways, but more often flatters the reader into thinking how hip s/he is to get it.
The autobiography is unique in the music bios I’ve read in that it is at once historical and not, that is it is closely tied to Costello’s (and his family’s) history but is so broken up by asides and leaps to other times that it is able to avoid that dread “and when I went to my first soccer game with my friend Rod Stewart” thing. It’s a measure of his cleverness and wit that he manages this very well (he wrote without a ghost). He’s also disarming in his modesty and enlightening in his many references to his family and especially his Dad who was a singer (thanks for the voice Dad!) and who clearly influenced him. Both the advantages and the problems with having a Dad in show business are there: some writer writes “Cool dad aging snazzily,” meeting many people and seeing musicians as musicians rather than stars, but also the philandering (his mom! Who comes up almost only in this context!), also homologue to his own life once he gets to a place where girls are swooning over “Alison” (and he is married and father to his own young lad).
And that’s a disturbing business he frequently returns to, when he found that his father was not faithful to his mother, in fact was a “ladies man,” and just a bit later, realizing that he himself was now also guilty of this, that shadow darkened by his knowledge of how his Dad’s philandering had hurt his mother. Elvis skates over it, but is obviously very very very guilty about his own unfaithfulness towards women (as he reminds us, it’s in the book’s title). It’s our national pastime to psychoanalyze celebrities and he gives us plenty of material: his infrequent mentions of his mother (he writes more about his grandmother, grandfather and certainly his father), his status as a single child. He writes of his long affair (or marriage?) to Cait O’Riordan of the Pogues. Outside the book (there’s more outside than inside on the affairs), an interview with O’Riordan in the Irish Independent goes like this:
“You know Pat Henry, [the fitness guru] don’t you? He has told me he knows couples right now where very plainly the man is punishing himself for being successful through his choice of woman. That really resonates with me. I think we can punish ourselves. We can use people to punish ourselves.”
“Was that the need Elvis was fulfilling with you?
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Is that what you felt?
“I hope it is not true, but it seems, just from my experience, that it might be true.”
This not from him, but the partner. Costello was raised, of course, Catholic. We expect him to be a little fucked up, we allow him to be. He is now happily married to Diana Krall with two sons.
Formerly famously dismissive of his band’s importance (and feuding with Bruce Thomas, his stellar bass player about it), here he goes out of his way to write about the many ways in which they were fabulous. He realized late what a gem keyboardist Steve Nieve was and gives him much specific praise for album orchestrations and on stage performances: “We could play anyone off the stage.” One of the great joys of the book is his many shout outs to music (Dave Bartholomew, “That’s What Got You Killed Last Time”) and performances by both his band and others (see below). He is generous, an attractive trait, but not one that had always been on view. And he really knows music.
I only started noting quotes half way through, this first one on his legendarily writing “Watching the Detectives” after hearing the Clash’s first album, “I was trying to work out why the flimsy but furious sound of this record, with its siren guitars and square, dry drumming, could come across as so powerful.” This passage opens a couple of pages on where his song came from (film noir mostly) and a new literary style for him (hard-boiled) that seems apropos to his entry with the Attractions onto the world stage. This is half way through the longish book, but your (my—Amazon reviewers are not always kind on this point) interest has not flagged.
A few more quotes:
My only luggage was a notebook with a confederate flag on the cover. It was hard to explain but harder still to lose.
Ray Brown leaned into the microphone and said, “Nobody play any ideas.”
They’ve got men building fences to keep other men out Ignore him if he whimpers and kill him if he shouts
Allen Toussaint
I’d asked a local cabdriver what people did for fun in the nearby village, and he’d replied, “Oh it’s all wife-swapping and witchcraft around here.”
This is a little video I made of a sculpture installation at the MoCA Gallery (成都当代美术馆) in Chengdu. My still camera was broken that day and I do not have any info on the artist (the museum does not keep up to date on their website). The music is “Supreme” by Ratatat.
It’s hard to describe The Florida Project because there really aren’t any films like it. The story is told from the perspective of a couple of seven year olds who live in an Orlando motel that has been converted into a housing project. Their lives are really really fun: little adult supervision, plenty of playmates and a playground-like environment of bright colors, weirdly decorated fast food restos, tourist hotels and abandoned housing developments. The actors playing the kids (Brooklyn Prince and Christopher Rivera) are riveting as is their mother (Bria Vinaite): Willem Dafoe as the manager lends a contrast, but even he plays along with the kids pranks and games. But as the film goes on, we can’t help but have a different understanding of what’s going on, and those other parts become more consequential even as we retain the kids’ perspective. The film works at so many levels, seductive, fun, colorful, playful, bratty, deep, disturbing and emotionally powerful: it’s one you’ll still be thinking about weeks after you see it.
Mudbound is set in the Jim Crow south of the forties. The “invisible lines” we think we’re familiar with are drawn in a little more darkly, a little more specifically, more dramatically. Director Dee Rees drew on family stories for details and they are telling. It’s about farm life: I kept thinking of the Drive By Trucker’s lyric, “There ain’t much to country living, sweat, piss, jizz, blood.” Add mud, which abounds. It opens on two white men digging a grave in a downpour who are stopped when they hit shackles and a skull.
13th is from last year but I saw it this year and it really moved me. Ava DuVernay’s polished film analyzes the history of African-American incarceration since the Civil War as an extension of slavery based on the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for convicts. The superlative use of images and news clips and the interviews with academics and public intellectuals (Angela Davis!) are pointed and clear. A fine film on an issue that needs to stay current as the national political discourse fragments. Like Mudbound (and 2017’s outstanding O.J.-An American Story), you can see the fruits of #oscarssowhite in the high production values based on suddenly better funding for work like this.
